Medical Education
Leadership and Business Training
Wellness and Well-being
Career Development
Trainee
Hadley Bloomhardt, MD
Attending Physician, Pediatric Advanced Care Team
Boston Children's Hospital/Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, United States
Sarah Tremallo, MSW, LCSW (she/her/hers)
Clinical Pediatric Palliative Care Social Worker
Good Shepherd Community Care
Stoneham, Massachusetts, United States
Workshop
Description: Provider grief is difficult to define, underdiscussed, and grieving providers are inadequately supported in our current systems. Healthcare providers are rarely taught how to recognize or process their own experiences of grieving losses in their work, and yet, being able to incorporate these experiences is essential to sustainable practice. With providers experiencing burnout and compassion fatigue at high levels, compounded by the strain of the COVID-19 pandemic, this workshop is a critical resource for individuals and teams. In this workshop, we will define provider grief, illustrate the connection between provider grief and well-being, and develop practices for supporting provider grief. We will bring a particular focus to how providers in teaching roles can support trainees to recognize their own grief and develop practices for processing these experiences. We recognize that acknowledging grief is in itself a powerful intervention to address grief; this workshop provides a starting point to target this important topic for yourself as a provider, an educator, and for your team.